The magical, life-like quality of Mueck’s hyper-realist sculptures is striking. They show no traces of the artist’s hand, which allows each work to create its own psychological effect – from defiance to puzzlement to sorrow – without an apparent mediator. The artist’s sculptures not only engage the viewer in an emotional voyage from birth to death, but present a poignant image of the existential problem of the human condition. The aura that emanates from each work is so strong that the object seems to demand an open-ended dialogue between two selves: sculpture and viewer. This exchange begins in the graphic depiction of birth provided by the huge, unyieldingly defiant newborn, A Girl (2006), and ends with the reduced yet powerful confrontation with aging and death of Old Woman in Bed (2000). In between, are works addressing everyday life - from the mundane to the consequential – including Mother and Child (2001-03), capturing the mutually inquisitive, fatigued, astonished gaze between two beings not yet separated but suddenly strangers to each other, In Bed (2005), a large-scale brooding depiction of melancholy, and the much smaller Seated Woman (1999), who seems to be reflecting on a life almost passed.